1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the display of advertisements on computer networks and more particularly to methods for extending viewing time of advertisements on a client browser operating in a distributed server computer environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
The use of advertising revenues to pay for information dissemination is well established in domains such as television and radio in which end users are tuned to a continuous signal over a lengthy period of time. In such systems, due to the continuous nature of the signal being monitored by the end users, the end users are sufficiently similar to a xe2x80x9ccaptive audiencexe2x80x9d that many or most end users remain tuned to the same signal even when the main program to which they are listening or viewing is interrupted by advertisements. Another example of advertising mixed with information dissemination is the use of scrolled text at the bottom of a television or computer screen where the main program occupies most of the end users visual field and a smaller portion is occupied by advertisements and the like on a scroll bar or similar visual device along the periphery of the screen. In some contexts, such as cable television channels that display a stock ticker tape, this relationship is reversed; the information portion of the screen occupies a small part of the screen, such as horizontally scrolling image region at the top or bottom of the display and the remainder of the screen is occupied by advertisements, infomercial, and the like.
Up until the present, distributing information by the Internet or other publicly accessible computer communication networks has been largely unsupported by advertising revenues due to the lack of good mechanisms for mixing advertising and information content in such a way as to be acceptable to both end users and advertisers.
The Internet is a network of computers which contains the world wide web (WWW), as well as other functions such as e-mail. Since the introduction of the WWW, there has been an explosion of growth in the usage of the Internet. Much of this growth has been fueled by the introduction and widespread use of so-called web browsers which allow for a simple graphical user interface based access to network servers which support documents formatted as so-called web pages. The World Wide Web (WWW) is that collection of servers of the Internet that utilize the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP is a known application protocol that provides users access to files (which can be in different formats such as text, graphics, images, sound, video, etc.) Using a standard page description language known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML provides basic document formatting and allows the developer to specify xe2x80x9clinksxe2x80x9d to other servers and files. Use of an HTML-compliant client browser involves specification of a link via a Uniform Resource Locator or xe2x80x9cURLxe2x80x9d. Upon such specification, the client makes a TCP/IP request to the server identified in the link and receives a web page, namely, a document formatted according to HTML, in return.
The present invention addresses a problem prevalent in electronic information distribution systems. In particular, xe2x80x9con linexe2x80x9d users often bypass advertisements by hitting a specific button or a control sequence such as Alt-F4 to bypass an advertisement. Most advertisers would like to extend the time period that their advertisement is before the viewing audience. Some companies offer free email or even Internet access in exchange for viewing advertisements. It is important that the viewer cannot easily tune out or ignore the ads. It would be easy for viewers to ignore banner or scrolling ticker tape advertisements. The present invention addresses this concern.
The present invention provides a system and method for displaying advertisements on the Internet in response to requests for Internet information from a specific website. In response to a request for a specific information available on the web, an advertisement associated with that web page is retrieved and displayed to the user. Within the display of the advertisement is embedded a randomly placed control function for proceeding from the advertisement to the web page of interest. Once the randomly placed control is activated by the user, the user requested information is displayed.
The random or non-predictive control function can be the placement of buttons within the advertisement display. The control function can be a control key randomly placed within the advertisement. Another control function is asking a question that must be answered before proceeding to the web page of interest. A further control function according to the invention is to display the advertisement which is correlated to the particular web page for a predetermined time period before transferring the window containing the content or web page the user has selected.